


Body of Subversion

by the_drift



Category: Venom (Movie 2018)
Genre: (partial) first time, Eddie considers his relationship with Venom, M/M, comfort (in a way), emotions and neurosis, it's not love it's something beyond that, relationships as cathedrals
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-26
Updated: 2018-10-26
Packaged: 2019-08-08 02:14:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,970
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16420421
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/the_drift/pseuds/the_drift
Summary: It’s been a while since Venom slithered its tendrils into Eddie’s life. It’s been a while since Eddie did not feel alone. It’s also been a while since he felt such a raw connection to someone, to something else. Venom is not a safe space, he knows that but he also has never been in a safer sanctuary than this hall of darkness inside Venom, this hall of death and teeth.Please read the Notes section.





	Body of Subversion

**Author's Note:**

> This entire fic was inspired by an amazing song from Ruby The Hatchet called “Heavy Blanket”, which I have been obsessively listening to ever since I saw Venom in the theaters.
> 
> I have mostly stuck to the movie-verse so far but there might have been some influences from the comics creeping through on occasion but nothing too major.
> 
> I was having one of my increasingly more common ‘bad days’ while writing this but, though the way I worded everything might come across as dark, think of the story as more of a surrender, on Eddie's part. 
> 
> Do comment please, it means a lot to hear your thoughts and suggestions. I hate kudos with the most burning passion. 
> 
> Please keep in mind English is not my first language and I am still doing my best to put everything properly in a more literary context so if there’s any big mistakes, constructive criticism is appreciated.

 

 

 

 

  
_Come wake me up_  
_In a heavy blanket made of some new lust_  
_Warm. Taste the blood_  
_Let it drip into the evil things we've done_  
_Sad. You're not free_  
_You can lay your heavy blanket over me_  
_I take the reins_  
_Please don't bury yourself with all your mistakes_

\- **Ruby the Hatchet** “ **Heavy Blanket** ”

 

 

 

  
**subversion**  
/səbˈvəːʃ(ə)n/Submit  
noun  
**noun** : subversion; **plural noun** : subversions  
**Latin:** _subvertere_  (overthrow)  
the undermining of the power and authority of an established system or institution.

 

 

 

 

 

How do you fill in the gaps?  
All the gaps people left in your life - an absent and often violent father, the gaps his fists had left. _A lover_ , the empty space of her departure, balled up in a corner of your soul like a used tissue. And all the other people in between. Those gaps make you tattered with holes, like the Moon, just that you’re not hit by asteroids but by the human connection and sometimes, Eddie thought, he’d gladly take an asteroid to the face instead.  
But you fill the gaps with helping other people, sometimes, and it’s not about _being selfless_ but about being _completely selfish_ , because doing that gives you some temporary fix. But that fix isn’t cement and the holes ultimately collapse once again - they’re too deep to fill.

It’s what he’d been trying to do back then, as a journalist - _help_. In helping, he was helping himself. It was a fair trade, he thought. It was selfish but what can you do to stop yourself from falling apart when no one wants you?

There’d been another gap, after the explosion. It was bigger than the others and it stretched wider, a hollow right in his chest, ugly and tattered, frayed at the seams.  
He’d ran away as soon as he got out of the river because he didn’t know what else to do. He ran all the way back home, without feeling the bruises and the cuts and all the broken things inside him, metaphorical or otherwise, ran up to his apartment and changed his clothes and went downstairs to the kebab place and sat down with a plate of hummus, pita bread and lamb kebab. It was when the scent of the food hit him - that had been what had made him snap out of the shock.

A hole inside him, like a gaping mouth, empty and hungry. A loss. A forest. A fire. Darkness, water, stars, lights.

 **Eddie** , echoed through his mind, his body, his chest, that empty hole reverberating with the hum of his name. He’d jerked his head left and right, but there was no one there and he didn’t know why he did it anyway - he knew that voice, and it didn’t belong to a human. He stared down into his hummus plate. Something moved inside him, the hole in his chest was coiling with black tendrils, twisting, twisting  
“Venom?”  
**Weak, Eddie. We need food.**  
“ _I thought you died_.” he whispered into the air. His chest was filling up, up to the brim. He felt awake and aware now, focused.  
**More resilient than you’d think. Or even than we’d think. But weak now. We have to feed. Please, Eddie.** The plea came weak, trembling, almost like an afterthought, its echo lost through the dark chambers of his mind.

Eddie doesn’t want to think about the rest of that night.  
As soon as he walked out the door, he closed his eyes to himself and surrendered to Venom completely and felt the symbiote cocoon him into the now familiar soft darkness and he felt safe and protected in that armor of black ink, as Venom released terror on the streets of San Francisco in a killing spree that made the news for weeks afterwards. Eddie didn’t read about it, he didn’t ask, he didn’t _want to know_ and Venom did not offer to say.

He wasn’t thinking straight, Eddie wants to believe, but he was - he took the conscious decision to let Venom go and kill and eat to his heart’s pleasure.

Why? Because Eddie was selfish openly for once and had admitted to himself in that moment that he would allow anything to happen for one single night, if it would mean that hole in his chest that Venom’s alleged death had left, would be filled again.

So he closed his eyes and Venom graciously put him to sleep and inside Venom he slept that night, without hearing a sound, without feeling a thing.

How calm that was - to not feel _anything at all_.

 

* * *

 

Eight Months Later

 

  
 Eddie had lost count. Coffee cups. Counting coffee cups. He’d worked through the last headache he had earlier with one, grabbed the styrofoam cup from a vending machine at a shop in Pacific Heights and drowned that bitch like it was water, before hopping back on the motorcycle.  
He was heading towards Chinatown now. He had no intention of going there but as all bikers know, you never have any intention of going anywhere when on the bike - you just ride. And Eddie needed the ride now, in the wake of his entire life having been turned upside down like it did in the past few months.

Though riding through night time San Francisco was a good way to force your mind to think of other, more immediate things -traffic lights, traffic signs, cars, bad drivers - it was just as easy to be brought back to the reality of life. Because it stirred. He felt Venom stir inside him. Or, around him, more exactly.  
The symbiote had wrapped around Eddie in the shape of a leather jacket, coiling and twisting in the neon lights. He was silent and unmoving, but Eddie could distinctly feel him. Them. Feel all of the creature pulse as if from inside him, could hear him breathe from behind his own lungs, a tightening, a caress of tendrils and slime, warm and cold at the same time.

He’d asked Venom to stay quiet for a while. He’d promised him a treat if he does. Maybe chocolate, maybe a human brain, Eddie was still undecided. If they found a guy bad enough, sure, why not?  
But until then, he would ride. He’d been riding for hours, ever since the sun had set in a purple blanket peppered in violent reds across the San Francisco bay.  
**Eddie,** Venom’s voice creeped inside his helmet, inside his head, in deep, almost primordial vibrations through his entire body. It had only been hours but it was like he was hearing it for the first time - rich with tone and cascading heavy, like molasses. He felt it drape over him like a heavy blanket.  
“Yes?”  
**The lights, Eddie, we want to see them** , came the surprising request. Eddie didn’t catch it for a moment, until he realized that Venom was asking to go up, up on the rooftops, and gaze at the city.

He’d done it a lot in the past few weeks. He never told Eddie why, but he saw it, from inside Venom, from inside that warm, silk-like darkness, he saw his eyes through Venom’s eyes through his own eyes and so forth infinitely, he saw the lights of San Francisco tearing through the cloudy skies of the October nights. Landscapes of neon and darkness. He felt something through Venom, almost like an echo of a feeling in his chest, but he could not say what - a sense of wonder, perhaps. A comfort of sorts.   
“Now?” Eddie asked, taking a sharp left turn, barely missing the green light. Someone honked on his trail but Eddie was gone just seconds after, turning on another side street, heading for the bay.  
**Tonight** , Venom said. Almost subdued, almost an echo in his mind.  
“Alright buddy, we’ll go see the lights.” Eddie agreed.

 

 

* * *

 

 He was wide awake through it, through Venom’s crawl across the San Francisco rooftops. He saw the city lights through his eyes and he saw the first shimmers of the sunrise on the edge of the bay - an overcast morning with violently purple rain clouds closing in. They could smell it in the wind, the tense atmosphere, like an elastic band stretched to the limit, ready to snap. They could smell the storm to come.

Eddie closed his eyes, his eyes behind Venom’s eyes with a tired surrender that he could only allow himself to feel when he was inside Venom, carefully wrapped in the body he had come to think of - much too fast, too soon - as a _home_. His apartment was a house, so was his mother’s place, or Anne’s, but the darkness of Venom’s body was the only one that felt like a home and something about that made him feel peaceful, while it also frightened him beyond ways he could explain it to Venom.

 _**There is nothing to fear here, Eddie.** _  
_“I know.”_  
_**Then why are you afraid?** _  
_“There are no words for this.”_

 

* * *

 

 

  
 When he came to himself, he was standing in front of his kitchen table, staring at his laptop and at all the forgotten Styrofoam coffee cups, all the scribbled notes on tissues. He remembered he was doing editorials now, under a fake pen name. Those were his notes for the editorial on Monday.

Venom was inside him, twisting, coiling.

Outside, the city was flushed with rain. Big, fat drops slid down across the windows of his apartment battling for ground in a war they all lost. _Tap-tap_ , the rain went. In the distance, someone was talking with someone else as they were going down the stairs. Their voices faded with a violent thud of the main door downstairs. Someone should fix that thing, it was noisy as hell.

 _Everything_ was noisy lately - the screams, the yelling of children, the door bangs, they all brought him to the edge. He started getting patches of red, dry skin all over his body, clench his teeth while he slept. He went to the doctor, refusing to let Venom fix it for him, or, alternatively, brutally dismember the recipients of those noises.

The doctor told him he was simply a more ‘ _sensitive person_ ’ and told him to follow the usual regime of meditation and perhaps try some earplugs. Eddie wanted to kill her and so did Venom. He had to leave in a rush - he just got up on his feet and walked out without another word. Venom took care of his rashes, but those words haunted him like the plague.

_Sensitive._

Said with a tinge of mockery, a slur of the tongue ever so faint, which hinted at a laugh, an internal eye-roll. It was not that he felt emasculated, not even in the slightest, perhaps it would have been much easier but it wasn’t that - it was rage against a word that reduced him to a squirming mess of a man for no good reason.

A word that did not acknowledge all the shit he’d gone through since his childhood and which he constantly had to swim through and, just when he thought it was done, other shit came in instead of the old shit to replace it. The constant threading through shit brought him to the very fine edge of the overstretched elastic band and he didn’t know how many inches closer to the edge he was before snapping.

Even stones get ground down by rivers, even if it takes millions of years. Eddie Brock was not a stone.

Dealing with getting his body inhabited by another being and then thinking he'd lost that being had been just tugs on the already stretched-out elastic band that was his neurosis. It had been a while, but it didn't change anything. His father's fists still haunted him. His regrets too, his mistakes, that hole he'd felt in his chest when he thought Venom was gone. 

 **We can hear you think.**  
“How about you stop, huh?” Eddie asked, rubbing the bridge of his nose, pinching it hard, making himself come back to the here and now.  
**We can help.**  
“There’s no need.” he replied, voice hoarse, tired. He threw the Styrofoam cups in the trash and took the only ceramic one on the table to the sink. It was true that since he’d started to get that sensitivity to certain noises, he found it hard not to wake up through the night as soon as he heard something. Venom had informed him he was barely sleeping at all, going through only the first stage of sleep out of the 4 identified by scientists and medical professionals. Generous as always, he offered to help.

And night after night, Eddie found himself enveloped by Venom’s body and entering a place without noise, without distractions, without light. He could not even hear his own heartbeat. But he could hear the traffic sounds or the weather outside. The cars driving across wet asphalt or the rain tapping gently at the windows. All these were sounds Eddie found comforting and which Venom had filtered specifically for him.

After not sleeping well and having his nerves tensed to the maximum, Eddie finally managed to sleep peacefully.  
He didn’t know how Venom looked while Eddie slept inside him. Or what he did. It must have been boring for the symbiote to spend his night like that but he never said no to it, when Eddie asked. More often than not, he was suggesting it himself.

It was safe there, inside Venom. Sometimes, half asleep, he felt with his hands around and there was nothing but the soft yet slithery feel of what could be called Venom’s skin. It was not moving, writhing, in any way. It stood still for Eddie to feel and grab, for his face to burrow deeply into its soft caress, inside the belly of this beast he’d grown to care for.

There it was, the _scary part_.

“Hey, Venom. Think you can get out for a while?”  
**No, why?**  
Eddie rolled his eyes and started washing the coffee cup in the sink.  
“I’d just want my mind to myself for a while if that’s ok with you.”  
**It is not.**  
“Venom,” he grit his teeth, ready for a confrontation, ready to have things go to shit again “ _get out_.”  
Venom twisted inside him, uncomfortably so. He constricted Eddie as he got out from inside him, as he often did when he was annoyed with his human. _His_ human.

Venom pooled at his feet for a few moments, tendrils bubbling to the surface here and there, before he assumed his form, 7 feet worth of violence and mayhem, in Eddie’s shitty kitchen. Eddie could feel him stare beyond that milky white gaze in ways no one had looked at him ever before in his life, but he’d gotten used to it. It was Venom’s way of letting Eddie know he was not satisfied with the situation, as he never was when Eddie asked him to be out for a while, but that he was not in the mood to argue, which, with Venom, was a rare occurrence.

In semblance to a great big cat, Venom found his way to the living room and laid down across the carpet in front of the sofa, which had become his favorite place to be at when he was out from Eddie’s body. It was never too long - though Venom was strong now, healthy, he still could not be out in the world without the use of Eddie’s body.

This strange symbiosis, Eddie thought, placing the clean coffee cup on a shelf, an ever-coiling Ouroboros, the way they had to return to each other, for some reason or another. Eddie felt it, even if Venom was laying just on the floor a few feet away from him, he felt that hole inside him again, the same way he had when he’d thought Venom was gone.

That was the scary part.

The comfort, the togetherness he felt. Alone but never alone he was now, in ways he’d never been before. He’d loved Anne, he truly had, but this, whatever this was, this surpassed that by light years. And it was frightening to him, frightening enough to be ready to fight Venom to get out of his body just so that Eddie could think about it without having the symbiote open the drawers of his brain in search for answers.

Venom already knew Eddie felt somewhat unbalanced, but he had not pried as deep into the issue as he could have, and Eddie had done his best to lead him astray from the subject.  
But the fact remained that he, Eddie Brock, felt something that could have only been described as love towards his symbiote, and that thought alone was terrifying.

 He went to the fridge and took out a ready-made meal which he popped into the microwave. He only registered a shot glance from Venom, who subsequently turned his head back away from him when he realized there was nothing of interest for him coming out of the fridge. He’d had his full earlier that night.

Eddie leaned his lower back into the kitchen table, arms crossed, staring into the microwave with an empty gaze. He could see Venom in the reflection, see the shimmer that reflected on its skin from what little light the rain clouds allowed in. He remembered sleeping inside him two nights before, when he had been plagued by nightmares that had nothing to do with the monster that slept inside him but the ones from faraway memories, of which he thought he forgot all about.

His fingers clenched in the air a little just remembering how it felt to bury his hands into the soft darkness that was Venom - the almost erotic quality of it, how it felt soft and slippery between his fingers. He squeezed his eyes shut, trying to push it out of his mind, but it had been plaguing his mind for a long time already: being safe not _with_ someone but _inside_ someone. Was that how Venom felt inside him too?

This bond, this symbiosis was so unique, especially for a human, it would have been impossible for someone not to feel… what was it? _Was it love_ , in the end? Was it a new type of unclassified infatuation? Eddie didn’t know. He was afraid to ask, but it had been a long time and, at this point, undeniable.

And perhaps some of it had tricked into Venom’s all-seeing mind too, because he had been more quiet, more obedient, more willing to help than usual. And what did it mean? Did it mean that Venom too, felt what Eddie did and through feeling what Eddie did, did he come to an understanding of it?  
Eddie watched his microwave food stop the cycle of cooking but he didn’t feel like eating it anymore, even if he’d been very hungry just minutes before.  
_Coffee, I guess_ , Eddie thought - the cure for all neurosis, in spite of his doctor telling him to cut down on it. But it was almost as much of a comfort as sleeping inside Venom was. But who could Eddie talk to in order to explain that, with all the intricacies it involved?  
There wasn’t a person on the planet.

 He made the coffee without even realizing he was making it, movements practiced through the years, same coffee brand, same packaging. When he finished, he held the cup between his fingers and walked to where Venom was. He stepped over him as he walked to his stereo player and turned the music on, the sweet sounds of a blues song filling the room. He found it quite fitting for the day, and to the way he was feeling at the moment. But no, not this, not now.  
He turned it off, listening to the rain. The sound of the traffic from beyond the windows.

 **Eddie.**  
“Venom?” Eddie replied, looking over his shoulder at Venom’s shape on the floor, as he took a sip of coffee. Venom did not say a thing and put his head down instead, as if he had made up his mind. He was starting to move around his edges, a sign that he wanted back inside. But Eddie couldn’t let him in yet.  
Today was not a good day for his mind, even less so to have Venom poke around in it.

And _yet_.

He sat down on the carpet, placed the coffee away from reach where he might spill it by mistake, and looked at Venom, his heavy shape a darkness on the backdrop of his carpet. He was already inching some of his smaller tendrils in Eddie’s general direction. Eddie sighed and stretched out a finger, with one tendril twisting around it, slowly, tentatively, before going up under his sleeve. He felt it slither upwards, all the way up to his shoulder, where it stopped, teasing motions that felt almost like a caress.

Venom’s eyes were watching him intently.  
More tendrils made their way towards Eddie’s hand and he welcomed their slow dance and when they gathered together in his palm and became one, he squeezed it slowly, enjoying the feeling it gave him, that softness, that cold that was not cold.

 **You always worry, Eddie.**  
“I do.” he replied. He didn’t even know what he worrying about this time, not precisely. And Venom was master at speaking about things Eddie did not even realize he was thinking of “Nothing I can do about it.”  
**There is only now** , Venom said, tendrils enveloping Eddie’s knees as he stood cross legged in front of him.  
“The consequences remain.” What were they even talking about ?

  
His hand let go of the tendril as others attached themselves to him and Eddie touched Venom’s shoulder, felt the strength under it, dormant but ready to be awakened into alertness at a moment’s notice. All that raw strength, just the thought of it, sent a shiver down Eddie’s spine, and not for the first time.  
It was all his, too - that strength. His to command, his to wield. _His to be protected by_.

This sanctuary of cosmic flesh and violence.

He ran his hand across Venom’s shoulders, over his head and the symbiote was tense with attention under his touch. His hands stopped over Venom’s teeth. Teeth that were not teeth, made out of a bone that was not bone which Eddie could not quite get his head around. Sharp as blades and just as dangerous and yet he yearned to touch them, as people often want to touch dangerous things as if they will not hurt them if they choose that brave course of action.  
Tentatively, Venom opened his mouth, just a little, enough to allow Eddie to anchor his hand on his teeth. He felt their sting, he felt them threaten to pierce his skin with just the slightest amount of pressure. This terrifying creature was his sanctuary and he loved it, for all its teeth and violence.

It was not the first time he thought about it, but it was the first time he transmitted that feeling onto Venom as openly, without realizing it, a rush of fear and affection washing over him in waves, like a tidal storm.  
“You can’t understand it.” Eddie said. It just came out without him wanting to. Venom’s tongue was licking his fingers, knuckle to knuckle, as they still stood perched up on his teeth. The act in itself was erotically uncomfortable and he was an inch away from surrendering to whatever there was to come.

 **We do** , the voice came, but this time from inside him, as Venom’s tendrils took a hold of him, he could feel it echo through his bones, through his bloodstream, **but only through you. If you open to us, we will know, and understand.**  
“You can’t. Not even I can.”  
**Maybe we can help you understand it, so we can understand ourselves.**  
“This doesn’t come as something new to you.” Eddie said, the corner of his mouth twitching up just a little. How did he ever assume he could hide this?

 **We feel what you feel, Eddie.**  
“This is strange, Venom.”  
**It might be. But we have seen things you cannot imagine, so it is truly not** , Venom continued, tone of voice even, paced, measured. As if, for once, Venom was thinking twice about his words. **And you, you have never been compliant to anyone’s ideas of what you should be,** he continued and it was just then that Eddie noticed Venom had slowly become taller before him, his hand hanging out of his mouth, still grasping on his teeth to the point of pain. Venom’s tendrils were wrapped around him and he felt fear and also excitement. He could hear his heart beat in his chest.  
_Love, love_ , the worst kind of love, and yet he _felt it_ and if it was not love, it was something inherently more primal, more violent, more sexual and more obscure than the human language had definitions for.  
**You, you Eddie, you are not a creature of compliance, but a body of subversion.**

He didn’t understand, but he did, somewhere in the depths of his soul, in those rooms of his mind that he never visited, the dark recesses of his being, he understood what Venom meant because Venom saw all.  
He should not feel something akin to worship in Venom’s regards, but he could not _not_ feel it as he towered over him in that moment, in the grey light of the late afternoon, tongue moving out of his mouth almost like another sentient being itself, brushing past the knuckles of his hand. Something in him wanted to press onto Venom’s teeth and see the blood drip down the symbiote’s mouth and be a part of him in another way.  
But there was no other way to be any closer together than they _already were_.

This was it, Eddie thought, to be one with someone else, in the purest, rawest form possible and, if this was not love, then it was beyond it.

Venom’s tendrils were reaching up his neck now, tugging at his lower lip, into his mouth, across his tongue and he felt his breath come out unevenly. Venom knew what he wanted, he’d known for a long time, what he yearned for, and judged him not in the slightest for it, Eddie was sure. He felt Venom search his mind, he felt him stir inside him, unlocking doors and hidden boxes inside Eddie’s mind.

Venom’s body sucked in all the light.

Eddie didn’t even feel him move, he just saw the darkness envelop him, blocking out the light and he closed his eyes in silent surrender because that was the comfort he understood, the comfort of that darkness. And he knew what was coming, and this was **it** and there was no turning back now and why should he?  
This was between him and Venom, and **_no one else_**.

He felt the tendrils undress him, he felt Venom’s tongue across his body, a warm breath on his skin, sharp teeth that were too close for comfort but close enough to be tantalizing in a way Eddie could not find proper words to describe.  
This was not he envisioned when he saw himself at this time in his life, but it was what he had dreamed of years ago - a closeness so pristine it would be akin to religion. A closeness that had no secrets, a closeness that did not know how to lie and one that saw your very worst and loved you none the less for it.

Because Eddie had always been just a step away from his worst at almost all times, it was a relief be seen like this, in all his emotional nakedness, and be desired no less for it. If desire what was Venom felt, Eddie did not know. Whatever it was, he felt it through him and Eddie wrapped his arms around him, around the black mass he could hold and felt all his muscles twisting and turning under his touch, the slither of the tentacles across his body, the tongue across his body and he felt hot and hard for it all.

His apartment was no longer cold - he felt flush and buzzing with desire and Venom responded accordingly, his tongue traveling all across him, trailing a path from his chest all the way down to his hips, crossing between his legs, making him harder, teasing at the entrance inside him. And he did want it, _god forgive him if there was any out there_ , he did want it all. To find the comfort of having the other inside him as Eddie himself had been inside Venom and for them to be inside of each other, endlessly, without knowing where one ends and the other begins.

Venom knew him. He knew his entire sexual history and he took his cues from it and Eddie let all the doors of his mind open for Venom to see, taste and learn. What could Eddie do? There was nowhere to run from it, from this desire he did not understand but which he felt embedded deeply inside him, in the most primal core of his soul.

 **You are safe, Eddie,** he heard it reverberate, the only voice that he now called home, _**I will keep you safe**._  
Eddie wanted to say ‘ _I know_ ’ but there was no need to.  
He let himself be taken like he only felt it was right to and he laid there on the floor, fucked and used in all the ways he wanted to, without feeling he was any less of a person because of it.

There were no mistakes between the two of them, there were no lies and, in this cathedral of darkness, they only worshipped each other.

 


End file.
